Jacob Holo wrote:There were two aspects of working on the collaboration with David I was nervous about and focused heavily on while writing my scenes: historical fidelity and character voice.SNIP I'm still handing a scene over to my senior partner that fundamentally works (I hope, anyway! ). That then makes his job easier when it comes to fine tuning certain details or adjusting a character's voice to his liking.

Jacob Holo wrote:These particular scenes take place quite a ways from the timeline's divergence point, so the geopolitical landscape is vastly different from the one in our history books. Other than that . . . I probably shouldn't say more. Though I will say there are about 20,000 words of alternate history notes that David wrote going from the divergence point to our modern era, and it's AWESOME stuff! Some of those notes are represented in the novel, but a lot of it is simply deep background material for the two of us. Regardless, I feel confident you'll enjoy the alternate take on events we present in The Gordian Protocol.

Hope so!

Totally understand where you're coming from. I've actually had similar experiences when watching anime. I've been a big fan of anime for quite a while, but by this point I've become fairly desensitized to unusual portrayals of Americans (both contemporary and historical) in Japanese entertainment.

Perfectly understood that, as a fan of anime myself) Well.

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- Who would won in battle between strawman Liberal-Democrat and strawman Conservative-Republican?- Scarecrow from Oz; he was strawman before it became political.

When reading this snippet, a few questions popped up in my mind. Questions such as "are they serious?" and "why?" and "couldn't they have found a better way to do this?"

Let me explain. This scene, at its core, seems to be setting up the frustrations of a presumed protagonist with the University administration he is working under. The basic script here is predictable; Our Hero, who knows he's good at heart and not aware of any wrongdoing, is confronted by his superior with something that, to him and the reader through him, sounds a lot like trumped up charges, spurious and irrational. In this case, our hero's frustrations have more to do with the system that is processing the charges, not so much the person bringing them ("Aware that Kikuchi-Bennett’s passion, however misguided he found it, was completely genuine, he’d dialed back his instinctive response."); our hero wishes to have an honest conversation, but is denied it by what he sees as a system that, intentionally or not, is designed to encourage witch hunts. This, as I said, is a somewhat archetypical entry point: There probably is a follow-on scene where our hero gets to decide to take a different career path and go on whatever adventure the rest of his story is about.

So far, so good. But here's the problematic part (oh no, he's using social justice buzzwords, take cover): For whatever reason, you chose to construct the incident that started this whole thing in a way that reads badly. Taking the protagonist at his word, he's completely centrist in his portrayal of history (if maybe veering leftist). He is confronted by a transgender (!), mixed-race (!?) student, who is using a bunch of feminist buzzwords ("white-male patriarchy", "priviledged", "patronizing") in an attempt to discredit him. This, to me at least, reads as insincerity on the part of you, the authors: Instead of constructing an incident in which anyone reading it could see that the protagonist is right and his accuser is misguided (but sincere), you constructed an incident that portraits the accuser as thoroughly irrational and more interested in confrontation than discussion (as evidenced by that part about "free speech zones" and "historical revisionism"). Intentionally or not, what you wrote here reads as a form of virtue signalling: You're using a bunch of stereotypes common amongst conservative "critique" of modern academia (too many social justice types screeching irrationally about things like patriarchy and priviledge without context or thought). Attaching signifiers like "transgender" and multi-culturalism only makes it worse: I was honestly waiting for "blue-dyed hair" to make an appearance as well. This will certainly make it easy for people like TFLY here to nod along with this paragraph and see our righteous hero for what he is, but to me at least, this scene could be so much better if it were tweaked just a tiny bit.

So here's a suggestion: Instead of having a transgender student make these accusations "genuinely", make it clear that the accusations are purely performative. For example, by having the accuser be a white boy with a MAGA hat and a Jordan Peterson shirt (or whatever the equivalent would be in this alt-history). This does several things: One, by showing the system being abused by someone intent on abusing it (and the administration semi-gleefully going along with it), it makes the protag's frustrations much stronger. Two, by changing the nature of the accuser from "misguided, but sincere" to "knowing full well they're trolling", the fact that the argument they're making makes no goddamn sense becomes part of the narrative, not something that would take a reader like me out of the narrative to wonder at the intentions of the writers.

The authors are pointing out a festering problem in our ultra-liberal colleges. The Social Justice Crusaders have found that the existing minorities are not oppressed enough any more, but they are unable to accept success and stop Crusading. They have to find or invent new minorities and convince them how cruelly they are being oppressed.

Today, minorities have been indoctrinated to find discrimination and persecution everywhere, whether it exists or not; taught that they are entitled to be whiny little bitches and demand that the whole world pander to them; conditioned to ‘feel threatened’ and spout off the ‘progressive’ buzzwords and catch-phrases they’ve been primed with whenever they are forced to interact with people who are not part of their minority, or when someone challenges their preconceptions.

The reality is that most of us aren’t interested in persecuting anybody. We have our own concerns. Once in a while we might go so far as to think, ‘Gee, that’s odd’ but in the end we just go on about our business. For the few that do want to cause trouble, there are already laws against assault, bullying and abuse. Those laws should be enforced equally, without making special provisions for particular kinds of abuse.

Some minorities like to complain that they face a ‘hostile environment’ if every single person around them doesn’t treat them like they are so, so special. Wake up and grow up! The world is a hostile environment that is constantly trying to kill you, and one day it will succeed. Learn to deal with that, like the rest of us. You can’t be protected from the world.

Regarding the particular situation shown in the snippet, if a boy wants to wear dresses and act girly, that may be kind of strange, but we live in a free country. It's his right. Pretending to actually be a girl crosses the line into delusion, and catering to such delusions does no one any good. I read about a girl who insisted ‘she was a boy’ so hard that she denied the existence of her periods, and the need for pads and tampons to deal with them. What will she do if she has a female health problem, and needs to see a gynecologist? Deny that too?

Boys must definitely use the boys bathroom, however they are dressed. There are real girls in the girls bathroom who would feel uncomfortable and disturbed about boys barging in on them, and rightly so. If you had a six-year-old daughter, would you want fifteen-year-old boys to be free to walk into the bathroom with her?

The government and the law are incapable of determining what is going on inside your head, unable to distinguish between a boy ‘really pretending’ to be a girl and a common perv that just wants to get into the girls bathrooms and locker rooms. Don’t try to tell me there aren’t plenty of those. The law can only recognize physical characteristics, and actions. If your physical characteristics include a dick, your actions must take you to the boys bathroom with the rest of the dicks.

This ‘transgender’ nonsense is just as much bullshit as if I were to go around pretending to be black and demanding special treatment.

The authors are illustrating the ‘tolerance’ of the left — anyone with even slightly ‘wrong’ opinions must be suppressed, excluded, denied access, shouted down, demonized and hounded from their positions. So what if a few people are deprived of their livelihoods; it’s no more than they deserve for such wrong thinking!———————————Anybody can choose to be ‘offended’ by anything. I refuse to allow my freedom to be held hostage to every whiner looking for something to be ‘offended’ about.

Dilandu wrote:In short: wrong. The gender identity disorder is a known condition to medics, and it really exist.

Okay, but so is schizophrenia. They should be treated, not indulged.

Not to make them 'normal' but to help them come to terms with the undeniable fact that they are physically male, or female. They can behave in any way they wish, but they can't be allowed to get all 'offended' when other people don't choose to live in their fantasy.

I'm not going to date a boy that pretends to be a girl. I'm not interested. That's MY right.———————————Anybody with a fireplace that big doesn't need an apple to make them look like an asshole. — from CinemaSins, about Citizen Kane

Imaginos1892 wrote:Okay, but so is schizophrenia. They should be treated, not indulged.

And the simplest & most effective way to treat them is gender conversion therapy. I.e. to transform the biology to the needs of psychic.

You see, we knew how our body work MUCH better than how our psychic. Which means, that when we are faced with dusrepancy between body and psychic, its simpler, safer and more effective to change body than the psychic. If your tabletop computer electronics did not fit into the casting, its simpler to change the casting, than demand that electronics must be redesigned completely.

I'm not going to date a boy that pretends to be a girl. I'm not interested. That's MY right.———————————Anybody with a fireplace that big doesn't need an apple to make them look like an asshole. — from CinemaSins, about Citizen Kane

For some reason, I really doubt that you recieve so much attention from trans-girls that it become a significant problem to politely decline their offers.

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- Who would won in battle between strawman Liberal-Democrat and strawman Conservative-Republican?- Scarecrow from Oz; he was strawman before it became political.

Dilandu wrote:And the simplest & most effective way to treat them is gender conversion therapy. I.e. to transform the biology to the needs of psychic.

Our current medical technology is not capable of transforming men into women, or women into men. All we can produce are moderately convincing fakes, at great effort and expense, diverting valuable medical resources that could have been used to actually save lives.———————————Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!

Imaginos1892 wrote:Our current medical technology is not capable of transforming men into women, or women into men. All we can produce are moderately convincing fakes,

If it is working (and it is working, because it was demonstrated that sex reassignment surgery greatly reduced stress), it is much better than nothing.

Imaginos1892 wrote: at great effort and expense, diverting valuable medical resources that could have been used to actually save lives.

Please. This "diverting valuable medical resources" is absolutely rubbish. The total number of sex reassignment surgery operations, preformed in USA per year is about 2000. You could save an order of magnitude more medical resources by banning cosmetic plastic surgery.

In short: illogical.

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- Who would won in battle between strawman Liberal-Democrat and strawman Conservative-Republican?- Scarecrow from Oz; he was strawman before it became political.

The E wrote:When reading this snippet, a few questions popped up in my mind. Questions such as "are they serious?" and "why?" and "couldn't they have found a better way to do this?"

Let me explain. This scene, at its core, seems to be setting up the frustrations of a presumed protagonist with the University administration he is working under. The basic script here is predictable; Our Hero, who knows he's good at heart and not aware of any wrongdoing, is confronted by his superior with something that, to him and the reader through him, sounds a lot like trumped up charges, spurious and irrational. In this case, our hero's frustrations have more to do with the system that is processing the charges, not so much the person bringing them ("Aware that Kikuchi-Bennett’s passion, however misguided he found it, was completely genuine, he’d dialed back his instinctive response."); our hero wishes to have an honest conversation, but is denied it by what he sees as a system that, intentionally or not, is designed to encourage witch hunts. This, as I said, is a somewhat archetypical entry point: There probably is a follow-on scene where our hero gets to decide to take a different career path and go on whatever adventure the rest of his story is about.

So far, so good. But here's the problematic part (oh no, he's using social justice buzzwords, take cover): For whatever reason, you chose to construct the incident that started this whole thing in a way that reads badly. Taking the protagonist at his word, he's completely centrist in his portrayal of history (if maybe veering leftist). He is confronted by a transgender (!), mixed-race (!?) student, who is using a bunch of feminist buzzwords ("white-male patriarchy", "priviledged", "patronizing") in an attempt to discredit him. This, to me at least, reads as insincerity on the part of you, the authors: Instead of constructing an incident in which anyone reading it could see that the protagonist is right and his accuser is misguided (but sincere), you constructed an incident that portraits the accuser as thoroughly irrational and more interested in confrontation than discussion (as evidenced by that part about "free speech zones" and "historical revisionism"). Intentionally or not, what you wrote here reads as a form of virtue signalling: You're using a bunch of stereotypes common amongst conservative "critique" of modern academia (too many social justice types screeching irrationally about things like patriarchy and priviledge without context or thought). Attaching signifiers like "transgender" and multi-culturalism only makes it worse: I was honestly waiting for "blue-dyed hair" to make an appearance as well. This will certainly make it easy for people like TFLY here to nod along with this paragraph and see our righteous hero for what he is, but to me at least, this scene could be so much better if it were tweaked just a tiny bit.

So here's a suggestion: Instead of having a transgender student make these accusations "genuinely", make it clear that the accusations are purely performative. For example, by having the accuser be a white boy with a MAGA hat and a Jordan Peterson shirt (or whatever the equivalent would be in this alt-history). This does several things: One, by showing the system being abused by someone intent on abusing it (and the administration semi-gleefully going along with it), it makes the protag's frustrations much stronger. Two, by changing the nature of the accuser from "misguided, but sincere" to "knowing full well they're trolling", the fact that the argument they're making makes no goddamn sense becomes part of the narrative, not something that would take a reader like me out of the narrative to wonder at the intentions of the writers.

If a white boy wearing a MAGA hat and a Jordan Peterson teeshirt were in the class, perhaps even TFLYTSNBN, he would not be the type of butt hurt little bitch who would go whining to the adminstration.

BTW, TFLYTSNBN is well aware of the multitude of genetic abnormalities XYY, XXY and in vitrio harmonal imbalances that result in people who do not conform physiologically or psychologically to the simplistic, binary gender system. They might or might not benefit from gender reassignment surgery or harmone therapy as oppossed to psychological counseling. They should not be subjected to physical assault or bullying. However; such people should not be enabled to exploit their very real disorders to establish a massive edifice of political grievances to impose on everyone else.

Did you notice the shooting scene with the avowed homosexual who expouses an extremely conservative political phylosophy? Perhaps some of this gender identity activism is noth8ng more than a temper tantrum?